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Thatcher: Your chest looks like a middle school desk. Rook: I’ve hugged cactus nicer than you. I scoff at the back of my throat. The two of them have yet to grow out of their boyish bickering. Unless someone stops it, they will go on forever until someone’s feelings get hurt, and it most definitely will be Rook’s. All of Thatcher’s feelings are tied up in Lyra. He doesn’t have any left for the rest of us.
“You’re gonna get married then? Hire a fake wife?” “I told my dad I have a girlfriend.” Not my proudest moment or smartest. But I needed him to give me time, and he wasn’t going to do that unless I gave him some hope I would actually marry for love. I did what I had to do. I always do. “Silas, I mean this with love,” Rook says, face the picture of confusion, “but what the fuck?”
“I don’t understand why you do that.” I arch an eyebrow. “Do what?” “That.” She motions to my face. “Just because you have money doesn’t mean your experience, what you went through, isn’t valid, baby. Money can never take that pain away. You’re allowed to hurt. You’re allowed to talk about it just as much as the next person.”
“Ohh…” Lilac hums, a knowing grin on her face. “Which one are you eye-fucking?”
“Scale of one to ten. What’s the likelihood of Easton trying to kill me tonight?” “An eleven.”
Our rivalry is built into the foundation of Ponderosa Springs. Hatred-filled blood scattered beneath the soil. The Halo was once started as revenge, the binding together of Sinclair men who kidnapped, beat, raped the daughters and sisters of Ponderosa Springs’s founding families. Caldwell. Van Doren. Pierson. Hawthorne.
“Don’t believe me?” He arches an eyebrow. “Statements are in my office. Code to the safe is 6598.” “My father can put his money and dick in whatever trash he wants,” Alistair grunts. “I want insurance.” “Call fucking State Farm, Caldwell.”
“The loss of innocence is inevitable. Happens to us all. You can’t stop fate, Hex.” I tilt my head, lifting both eyebrows in challenge. My voice is raw with conviction. “Watch me.” Without missing a beat, he replies, “I am.”
We figured out where we were going, but the only garden Rosemary Donahue has now are the flowers I have delivered monthly to her tombstone.
“Plus, it wasn’t Briar’s idea. It was Lyra’s.” Thatcher chuckles under his breath, a rare sound that only comes out when his girlfriend is around or mentioned. He presses his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, shaking his head. Lyra is sneaky, going to the girls knowing Thatch would say no. Not because he doesn’t want to play but because with everything going on, his main priority is protecting Ponderosa Springs’s favorite bug queen.
Lyra falling into his chest as he wraps his arms around her front. “Must have good taste, then,” she snips, adjusting the leather jacket on her shoulders. “Debatable,” he mumbles before pressing his face to the side of Lyra’s head, burying his nose into her loose curls like a psycho. I joke that he’d live inside of her body if he could. Which turned into a long-winded debate about a vore kink.
Apparently, my pussy is voice-activated.
“When I find you with your hand still in your panties, are you going to let me replace your fingers with my tongue?”
“Inevitable checkmate.” He’s staring at me with hooded eyes that see all the lies I’ve tried to shove deep. He knows that what we just did broke a wall I’ll never be able to rebuild. “It means you’re mine now, Hex.”
This is the problem with being silent—everyone assumes your feelings. They build your narrative without facts and spit it out at you like it’s truth, using context clues and bullshit to spin a web so they can understand you. When you don’t speak, no one knows your story.
“The first time I kiss you, Hex, is when I make you my wife.”
“Nothing I can ever give you will resemble love, Silas.” “Then I’ll pretend.”
I dip in and steal my first taste of the Witch of Ponderosa Springs. The Cursed One. For once, this town might’ve gotten something close to right. Her mouth is a spell.
Coraline has to bite down on her lower lip to keep from grinning, and I find myself unreasonably angry at her teeth for gatekeeping it, hiding away one of the rare and beautiful things she does. I like her smile. I like her laugh. I like her.
“I—” “Silas Edward Hawthorne!” My mother’s voice pierces through my apartment, making Coraline jump. Her eyes widen, mouth falling open. “Oh, that’s full name. You’re fucked,” Levi laughs as he walks back into the kitchen.
“You did what you had to do so you could stay alive. That never made you weak. It never meant you asked for it. It makes you a survivor.”
I went through something horrific, I lived, and everyone told me I was lucky. But no one showed me how to live with it. With this weight, this pain, these memories. “You’re still living in survival mode. You just have to learn to turn it off, baby.”
“Say another word about my wife, and I’ll leave your guts on the doorstep of your house. You think your son will enjoy finding what’s left of his father?” Everyone has a weak spot, a point where they break. You just have to know how to find it. “What do you want to know?”
“You can’t be serious,” she breathes, chest heaving. “You’re going to let me hold a loaded gun to your head while you—” “I said it, didn’t I?”
“I’ll take a bullet in the skull, Hex. Just make sure you come on my tongue before you pull the trigger.” “I—I can’t—” “Take the fucking gun, Coraline. I won’t ask again.”
This is my Garden of Eden, and I’ll sin every time if it looks like her.
“And if you wanna fuck yourself, use my gun to do it.”
“You’re my wife, Coraline Hawthorne. If I want to cover myself in the blood of a thousand more men to protect you, I will,” I tell her. “They cannot hurt you without having to answer to me.”
No one talks about how powerful hands are. Not the innate strength they can exude but the feeling they can provide when attached to the correct person. Some hands can simply exist and evoke emotion. Silas has hands like that. Which is the most unfortunate thing in the world for me, personally.
Technically, our room since we are sharing because I refuse to share a bed with him. I will bite my tongue and sleep on a bed that sits opposite my seventeen-year-old sister until she goes to college, just so I don’t fall into the one-bed trope. I will prevail.
Silas Hawthorne has a slutty fucking waist. But his hands.
“Stupid hot, sexy hands.” I curse beneath my breath, strangling the banner in my hands. “Stupid cologne that smells good, stupid tongue that—” “Looks like we showed up right on time.”
“Anyway, we aren’t trying to be friends to make a quick buck from the tabloids.” “Then why?” “Dude,” Sage sighs, as if it’s obvious. “You’re our fourth.” I furrow my brow. “Fourth what?” “You’ve never watched The Craft? 1996 cult classic?” I shake my head, which makes her jaw drop, like I’ve just told her I’ve committed a crime. “Movie night is in the books for this weekend. I can’t in good conscience let you walk further into this world without watching Fairuza Balk dominate,” she orders. “But for now, just know you’re our fourth. If it takes you some time to warm up to that idea, so be it.”
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Just like the night of hide-and-seek, that sparkle of hope ignites in my chest. So, I offer an olive branch. “Which one of you knows how to hang a banner?”
I deflect and bite when people get too close, but Sage has teeth, too. “Sweetheart, don’t try to mean girl me.” Sage’s eyes flame with the challenge, blue eyes burning as she glances down at her red nails. “I’ll hurt your feelings.” I doubt anyone, including me, could out-bitch Sweetheart Sage Donahue. Her wrath is notorious.
“What do you need?” Silas asks. “Huh?” “What do you need?” he asks again. “You frown when you’re upset. Tell me how to fix it.”
Don’t ogle his thighs, Coraline. You’re angry.
“I’m not jealous, Hex.” There is a chuckle in his voice, dark and demanding. “I know what that uptight pussy of yours tastes like, and it’s my cock that you crave. I’m protective over what’s mine. Don’t confuse the two.” “I—” “Don’t fucking deny it,” he snaps, shaking his head a bit. “Don’t make yourself a liar.”
“You want me?” He tilts his head, shadows splaying across the contours of his handsome face. “You’ll crawl.”
Silas leans forward, grabbing my chin between two fingers. “Pout those pretty fucking lips and say please.”
“You gonna be a good girl for me, Hex? Let me use your holes until they are leaking my come?” he grunts, eyes intense and unyielding. “Be sure about your answer because I’m not just gonna fuck you. I’ll ruin you. Your body isn’t yours—it’s mine. It’s my temple to worship and mine to fucking destroy.”
I press my hand to his lower stomach, halting his motion, peering up at him through damp lashes. “I’m going to break your heart.” He stills, jaw twitching. “You’re going to let me into yours.”
“There is no defeat when you refuse to lose. We can only be beaten when we give up on ourselves, Coraline.”
“I gave you my word to be your secret keeper. You took an oath, kept a secret. Now you can give it to me.”
“When I was twelve—” I clear my throat. “—I had been seeing a psychiatrist for a few months. My parents were freaked about how reclusive I was. They thought talking to someone other than them would be good for me.” Even all these years later, I can see the small version of myself going into those appointments, spending hours just sitting on a leather couch, playing chess and talking about nothing. There wasn’t anything wrong with me. I was just quiet.
“I made her a promise that I’d never tell anyone, and she promised to believe me when I told her there weren’t voices, that I wasn’t losing my mind.” I lived my entire life with a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia to keep her secret. To keep her safe. Because she was the only person I had, and I didn’t want to lose her.
“When you’re ready,” she hums, a yawn stealing her voice, “you’ll tell them. I’ll go with you. We can do it together.”
Sage mirrors my stance, standing by my side to stare down at her sister’s grave, and I think it’s telling.
It’s complicated ‘cause I know it’s better for me to keep my distance emotionally. Physically, we’ve already been closer than any two people should be. That man was in my fucking guts last night.
“I made a promise. A few years ago, after my dad was killed—” “I thought the fire he got caught in was an accident?” Sage drags her tongue across the front of her teeth. “You met my boyfriend?” Good point.
